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The Butterfly Effect: The Critical Initial Conditions |
Every time you wink the stars move. - Emerson
Edward Lorenz started it all in 1960. As a research meteorologist at M.I.T he created a computer program designed to model the weather. Lorenz had reduced weather into a series of formulas that behaved in a recognizable weather patterns.
In his superb book Chaos, James Gleick recounts a winter day in 1961 when Lorenz wanted to shortcut a weather printout by starting midway through. To give the machine the initial conditions, he typed the numbers straight from the earlier printout.
Something unexpected happened. What he noticed was his new weather pattern had diverged dramatically from the old run. Within a few simulated months of weather all resemblance of the previous printout had disappeared.
At first he thought his computer had malfunctioned. Then it suddenly hit him. There was no computer malfunction. The answer was in the numbers he had put into the computer. In the original programming he had used six decimal places: 506127. In the second run he had rounded off the numbers to .506. He assumed that the difference one part in a thousand would make no real difference.
He was wrong. This slight change had made a HUGE difference. This tiny change in input had quickly created an overwhelmingly different output!
The formal name for this phenomenon is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Its informal name is The Butterfly Effect. Simply stated, it means that the tiny changes brought about by a butterfly moving its wings in San Francisco have the power to transform the weather conditions in Shanghai.
Every human relationship is basically nonlinear. Hence, great care must be taken to insure that the initial conditions are as clear as possible. Every tiny change will dramatically change future outcomes; the further along the journey the more dramatic the difference in the outcomes. Elegance or inelegance is determined on how well these initial conditions are established.
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